Recycling king needs just one bin bag all year

BRITAIN’S greenest homeowner yesterday achieved his goal of producing just one bag of rubbish in an entire year.

John with the single bag holding all the 2012 rubbish he couldn’t recycle

John Newson, 60, has picked through his left-overs since last New Year’s Day and has put all his uneaten food on a compost heap in his garden.

The self-employed environmental researcher, who does not eat meat or fish, even grows his own salad and fruits to cut down on supermarket packaging.

John separates his cardboard, paper, plastic bottles, glass and cans for kerbside collections.

He even travels to Bristol and London to recycle margarine tubs and Tetra Pak juice cartons because they have better recycling facilities.

His single bin bag is full of plastic film packaging, which he cannot recycle and has been unable to find a use for in his home in Balsall Heath, Birmingham.

John, who is single, said: “People ask, ‘Why on earth are you doing this?’ I just wondered, if you compost absolutely everything that will rot and recycle everything you can, what will you be left with? I wanted to push myself to an extreme to see how far I could go.

“If you had six children and lots of disposable nappies, it would be different. But I’m not doing this to score points off any other household in Birmingham, I’m just asking what could we feasibly get our recycling rate up to.

“I would say that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of all waste can be composted or recycled. At the moment in Britain, it is currently about 30 per cent.

“With 400,000 households across Birmingham, that is 20 million plastic bin bags that are being produced, distributed, collected and burned each year.”

Meanwhile, residents living in the Bordesley Green area of the city are fuming after hundreds of rubbish bags were left on the streets because bin-men failed to collect them on Boxing Day.

The residents claim they had been promised a visit but have now been without any kind of collection for more than two weeks.

I would say that 80 per cent to 90 per cent of all waste can be composted or recycled. At the moment in Britain, it is currently about 30 per cent

John Newson

Resident James Furnish, 45, said: “We all have a bit more rubbish at Christmas, and when they don’t come and pick it up, what can we do? It’s piled high down every street.

“They haven’t even cleared the litter bins they provide on the streets, so those are overflowing as well.

“Pretty soon this whole area is going to start to smell awful. It’s disgusting.” A spokesperson for Birmingham City Council insisted collection dates had been made clear to residents.

He said: “The bins are collected weekly. They were suspended over Christmas Day and Boxing Day and that was widely publicised. Collections resumed on December 27 and will be continuing over New Year.

“If they would normally have a collection on Boxing Day, they will have one on January 2.”